The appliance of science in travel - using sentiment created by images

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By Viewpoints|February 2, 2017

Online travel agencies have databases full of hotel content, ordered so that they can serve their customers with the best offering that has the highest likelihood of a conversion.

The state of technology at this moment is on the verge of converting what a customer sees and feels into useful data.

NB: This is an analysis by Marcel Ruijken, founder and CEO of CliqOrange.

Yet, in some respects, the ideal situation would be that a website can communicate with a customer like a human being.

The website would see, feel, hear and perhaps (or rather not...) smell like the visitor.

It would also know what kind of trip a customer is looking for and how his/her desires are evolving within their actual life cycle - a change of job, relationship, new sporting interest, and numerous other bits of data that influence travel behaviour.

The state of artificial intelligence right now is called "Artificial Narrow Intelligence" (ANI) or "Weak AI".

ANI refers to simple single tasks such as voice recognition, classifying visual objects or text, sentiment analysis and self-driving cars.

This shows the importance of photos or, going another step forward, videos.

What really happens in the brain is that curious travel shoppers are visually forming their next "trip story".

Images that remind them of a trip will immediately trigger an emotional "state" of excitement, reward and happiness, according to Harvard's Shawn Achor, one of the world’s leading experts on the concept of happiness and well-known for his advocacy of positive psychology.

Anyone selling travel should understand that getting your customer in this state is vital for sales.